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Get a DemoWhat does a content flywheel look like when it’s firing on all cylinders? Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty) break down how their teams structure content creation end-to-end: from micro-creators and TikTok Shop affiliates to high-production studio shoots and ambassador programs. Both hosts bring their own playbooks to the table to compare notes in real time. They cover the three core buckets of a paid ad account, why scripted UGC is losing ground to raw “yapper” content, how to negotiate more deliverables without doubling creator rates, the TikTok Shop affiliate flywheel, and why building an in-house production playbook is one of the highest-leverage investments a brand can make. Powered By Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 https://motionapp.com/thumbstop-pulse/creative-benchmarks-2026?utm_campaign=marketing-operators&utm_medium=sponsor&utm_content=creative-benchmarks-2026&utm_source=marketing-operators-podcast Aftersell https://9ops.co/4i3bb5 Haus https://www.haus.io/operators Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Hat, Stash, Flow 00:06:57 What Is a Content Flywheel 00:08:12 Inside the Ad Account 00:13:45 The Quarterly Content Plan 00:17:28 Find & Brief Creators 00:22:55 Head of Creator Is Next 00:27:43 TikTok Shop to Meta 00:31:15 Organic Reels & New Reach 00:33:34 Structure Big Creator Deals 00:38:48 The 10x Content Rule 00:44:18 The Non-Creator Playbook 00:49:15 Hero Shoots & Top-Down 00:52:30 One Shoot Day & 30 Ads 00:54:55 The HexClad Chef Strategy 00:58:54 Briefing Paid vs Organic
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All right.
Welcome to episode 112. It's been a minute, Connor. I don't know if you and I have ever actually done it. I'm sure we've done an individual podcast, but it's been a while. Welcome to episode 112, Connor. How you doing?
I'm doing well. I think this is Connor Mack's like second missed operators podcast. I think he has like a 99.2% hit rate on these, but, but he's not here today. So we're going to, we're going to run the show, but I'm doing well. Beautiful day in Denver, Colorado. Can't wait to sit inside and look at it from my window while I'm, while I'm doing e-com all day.
Connor, I like the look. I like the hat, the stache, the flow. I feel like you're— you look like you're like fresh off like a hiking trip or a ski trip. What's going on in your world?
What is going on in my world? Well, the nice fellows at Huckberry sent me this last Christmas. It's one of my new go-to hats. Dude, ski season's fully over, but I'm training for a trail run right now. So that's been my— that's been my non-e-com stuff. Dude, I've gone fully, I know you're like, you're a big weightlifter. I've gone fully in on like all the, all the zone 2, like how to, how to train zone 2, like threshold climb. Like I got, I'm like deep in that rabbit hole right now and it's been fun cuz I haven't never like fully gone on like a, a true plan for like aerobic endurance training. So that's been my new, that's kind of been the new thing I've been nerding out on. I got my like, my Claude personal trainer, nutritionist, just fully dialed in right now, giving me weekly plans. And it's been fun. It's— I'm not, I'm not built like a runner, so it's been cool to like go down that rabbit hole.
I was going to say, I see like the traps right now. Like you're the only guy who can like not lift and do green juices and go run and still have, still have shoulders and traps like that. I'm jealous, dude.
You build the foundation. It was, it was 12 years of heavy weightlifting in high school. And after that, it's like it hasn't gone away. So now I'm, now I'm on the running train and we'll see. See what happens. But yeah, I got a trail run in, in mid-July in Aspen, Colorado. So that'll be interesting. It's like, I'll be like running at 10,000 feet elevation. I'm gonna go out there and, and stay with Bar from Boost Kuz for the week and acclimate and then hopefully get a decent time. And it's been, yeah, you know, it's fun to have something just to like train towards, you know, I typically don't, it's just like lifestyle stuff and I like doing it, but yeah, it's been fun to actually have like this thing that I'm, that I'm working towards and have a plan that builds into it and it's, Certainly easier to like follow the plan when you know it's contributing towards like some, some moment in time. So it's been cool. How about you? Are you— what's, what's going on in your, in your like health, wellness, recreation?
Dude, it's good. I started playing golf again. I had a hip surgery like a year ago and had some setbacks, so I'm just training. I'm— I go, I go back and forth, but I'm training in the garage. I was going to the gym most mornings, and now that it's warm, I have like a pretty good setup. I have like trap bar, I have a tonal, I have some kettlebells in the garage. So, um, yeah, just training, you know, very, very functional training, like getting like a 30-minute lift most mornings. I have, uh, my computer open doing some Claude sessions while, while I'm doing it, trying to like trick that out. I might even buy like a, like a TV as a monitor for it. Um, you know, you can't ever miss a moment, but yeah, just mo mostly lifting. I, I need to get better at, at finding some aerobic stuff that I like, even just some like low-level zone 2, you know? Um, that's the thing. I think my heart is, uh, my heart could use a little bit of work and just like helps with overall, you know, health and, and stress. But it's, but, but it's good trying, trying to do it, you know, 30 minutes a day, um, between whatever, you know, sleepless nights and kid stuff. But, uh, always got to do it. So for me, it's more just like keeping dad bod away.
So I'm painting this picture right now. It's like Cody in his, in his home garage gym, laptop perked up, like prompts Claude. Then after he— that's in between sets. Then Claude's doing its thing, like autonomously. Then Cody goes and does a set, and then like checks in between. Is this what's going on?
Tell my wife, because like, I sometimes I'll work out if, if I can't work out in the morning, I'll get like a 20-minute workout in once I get home. But I'm like, I'll do it like, I'll have a few kettlebells and I'll like do it while watching the kids and like trying to get dinner ready while I claw. And I was doing some like, some like continuous kettlebell stuff, and I was telling my wife like, this is perfect. I do 5 minutes straight of this, 2 minutes of claw, 5 minutes of this.
I love that.
It's perfect.
So awesome. What a What a sequence.
Yeah.
All right, dude.
Tonal.
How is Tonal? What's the deal with that?
It's pretty sick. It's nice. Um, cuz you get, you, you get like the full, and then, you know, eventually we'll, we'll talk about marketing, but Tonal's actually, I think, a really cool company. Um, Rob Webb was like, you know, used, used to be head of growth there and I think he's at Magic Mind now. Um, so, so shout out, shout out to Rob. I don't know if he's a listener or not, but, um, it's awesome. It's like a cable machine. It's got all of the, the technology in it so you can like do classes and stuff like that. I don't do it, so I don't have a membership live and active. So I really just do like, if you have like the membership that's live, you can do all of their like classes and workouts. But you can also like pick exercises and it'll like save your volume and all of that stuff. And so you can actually, you know, make sure you're getting progressive overload and stuff. It's really cool because you have like different methods. So you go like eccentric, isometric, like there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with it. And you can just like push it, you know, pretty heavy. So it's just like a super efficient way where it just goes on the wall. So yeah, big, big, big fan. I don't, so I don't have any like dumbbells in there. I just do Tonal and then I have kettlebells, a trap bar. I have a barbell, so I do a lot of like landmine work, but pretty, pretty, pretty efficient in there.
I'm curious how Tonal's doing these days. I think they were a COVID company, right? And like, I imagine they popped off during COVID when no one was going to the gym. And I'm curious, so I don't, I don't know. I do think home gyms in general have like, like I think COVID, I don't think those, I think those continue to grow. Like it seems, at least it seems to, to be that way. So I don't know.
I was even thinking about Peloton. Peloton's public so we can look, but I was thinking about it, but like, yeah, I don't know anything good. I know. And some of those, like, I think I'm a little like, uh, nostalgic, if that's the right word, to like some of these, like, you know, 2020 era, like D2C brands, like Comator and stuff like that. They're like, they're probably not doing great as businesses. They're probably really struggled and probably raised too much. But like, it was like peak and like, I just, I did love that era and like, I do think there were some like really cool brands that, you know, came out of it. Like I think Comotor is really cool. It's just like, they're just like hard business models and they don't really necessarily work that well. Um, even HelloFresh, I feel like is there a little bit where it's like a great thing. It's a great service. They're a great brand, but like, I just don't know if the business model is viable.
I mean, Peloton stock looks good in the last month. It's up 34%, but in the last year it's down 22%. So I still I still rip my Peloton every, every now and again. I'm not usually doing the classes anymore. I usually just do like the Just Ride and I'm just like taking it easy on some zone 2 stuff. But yeah, I think I agree with you. It is a tough space.
Here's what I want to talk about today. Creative flywheels. I think, I think this will be a fun one. The original question that was posed from a, from a, you know, listener was like, what's the flywheel look like? What's the flow look from like influencer to paid? And I was like, hey, look, this could be actually just like a really good overall creative flywheel discussion. So I'd love to hear how you guys do it, how you think about it. Um, and, and what I said on the stage, what I mean by flywheel is like, you know, if I like how I'm thinking about it at least is like, how are you leveraging content that teams are creating across all different avenues to create leverage and, you know, ultimately feed the ad account? Obviously there's, there's a ton of content needs that's outside of the ad account. Um, and definitely want to chat about them, but like, what does the flow look like to feed them? We've talked about that a lot of like TikTok Shop can feed it or whatever. So I know you guys do a lot of like production stuff. I'm very excited to ask about that because we just did some big production stuff. How you budget for content like that, that's kind of the conversation I want to have. So let me, let me start by asking you about it. Like, what are your sources of content? What do you make? What percentage of your ad account is like net new, just produced for ads for like Meta ads? What percent is coming from influencer, from partnerships, from TikTok? How do you guys kind of like break up your ad account?
I would say we probably have like this is totally off the top of my head, so I'll have to QA these numbers, but I would guess that like a third of our ad account is probably creator-led stuff, whether it's, you know, anywhere from Gordon Ramsay to, you know, kind of Jane Smith who has, you know, 5,000 followers but makes great ads that convert. So that's probably a third of it, 25%, depending on the time of the year.
And is that like partnerships usually, or is that kind of split between partnerships and brand handle?
Split, but a lot of partnership ads. I, again, I wouldn't, I don't know exactly how much, but a lot of it is like, you know, chef name with Hexclad partnership ad. Um, and then we run a lot of it, like we run a lot of Gordon stuff from our brand handle as well. So I'd say about a third of it's that. I would say about, um, maybe 20 to 25% is like, or maybe higher is, is maybe up to 33% is stuff that we are like video that we are producing in our studio. So think like more higher production value stuff, um, like product hype reel type assets that, that we're making. Um, some of it's more like YouTube ads that we're then doing cutdowns on. Um, but like really high fidelity stuff. That's actually been a, a bucket of content that we really have tried, been, been focusing on beefing up in the last 2 years. And if you go look at our ad library now, a lot of our content is more higher fidelity stuff, whereas like 2 years ago. That number on the like lo-fi creator-led stuff was probably up to like 50%, you know, maybe even 60%. Um, we just wanted to like introduce more hi-fi, more premium feeling assets into the account. And then I'd say the other, like the last 25 to 30% is just like static ads, um, that, that our designers are going in and doing more like graphic treatments on. So I think those are like generally the 3 core buckets that most brands have is like Native creator-led stuff, more higher fidelity kind of shot stuff you're shooting or an agency shooting in a studio. And then you have your just like straight up more graphic treated ads. And then obviously within that there's like a massive, uh, you know, if you drill down one, one level deeper, there's a huge like, um, split of like what are the angles we're hitting? What are the products we're hitting? What are the creators we're hitting? But I think those are generally the, the 3 buckets, like the highest level of, of bucket and. You know, we just like, we, we operate. I'm curious to what your process is, but like, I want to mention this because I actually think this is something that is, is like the obvious thing to do for most brands. But I think a lot of brands like get so, so in the weeds and like they're almost like 5 feet from their ad account and all the creative they're producing at any given time that they don't, they don't lean into this. But like we create a plan every quarter. So like we have a, we operate on like quarterly sprints for the entire growth team. Um, that's not unique to paid media creative, but like every plan, every quarter we run through this process of like creating a plan that we're going to go and try to produce against. And like, we're very thoughtful and intentional about not trying to like fill up every creative testing slot in this plan. Cause we also want to have the space to like react and iterate on things, um, intra-quarter. But like we create a plan every single quarter. We're in the process of doing it right now. It'll probably be finalized in the next week or two. And then like, that's the Bible for what we go and produce against. And like, that just allows us to zoom out and kind of say, hey, what's working? Let's go produce more stuff like that. What's, what are we not doing at all that we think has upside? Like, let's go produce more stuff like that. Like there are certain creator niches right now and certain ad angles that we think creators can bring to life that like we just think we need to go and create stronger content pillars against. Like that, that's a huge part of our creative plan. And then we get into the quarter and it's really easy for us to look at and say, hey, we want to, we, we think we're not hitting this angle enough. Like, what are all the ways that we can go and do it? We can go work with these creators. We could do this type of like comparison shoot in our studio. We can do these types of like graphic treatments. And now we have like a very— I think by the end of the quarter we'll have like a very robust grouping of ads that like hit on that, on that angle. And like that's the whole goal with having these like roadmaps. But I think not enough brands are, are doing that, at least in my experience. Like you have too many people that are just thinking like, one week at a time or two weeks at a time. And like when you do that, you can't zoom out and think about those bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's your, what's, yeah. So what's like the JRB? Well, well, let me, let me actually ask you the first, the question you asked me first, like what's your like ad account makeup in terms of like content types and where you're getting it from? And then like, yeah, I'm curious what your sort of like roadmap, uh, plan or process looks like.
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I'm much better at strategy than I am about operations. I'm actually like just absolutely awful about operations. So like I need to surround myself with people that are, that are good at that. Um, yeah, even on the creator stuff you mentioned, like, There's also different, like even looking ways to break that down. 'Cause obviously you have your micros, you have your influencers. Gordon, I know you guys are doing production stuff with, which like I, I love pairing those things together. Um, so yeah, I love that.
I'm happy to break into that too after this. We can talk about like how we, how we look at those deals and where that content's coming from.
Definitely love that. So yeah, we have, um, let's say creator stuff. So we, we have, we use Superloom as, you know, You know, for influencers, so they do a majority of our partnership ads. We have two different kind of pipelines that we use for that. So I'll call that like influencer, it's creator. One of it is purely a UGC play. And so we'll, we'll, it's still, um, it's still partnership ads and these are still like people that you want partnership rights to. They might be different sizes. Um, just all depends on the deal and the negotiations. So some of them are micros, but they're not like, you know, these are not like $300 per video. Like these are still like people that have some, some following. So some of them will be pure UGC. People don't post, but they're just contracted for ads. We're doing less and less of that for a few reasons. And so there's a lot of like, you know, paid influencer to organic pipeline. It just, we find it works better. What's working really well is just that whole like yapper thing. It's like no edits, like weekly we'll be in team meetings and I'm like, guys, look, this is like, there's no edits on this one. Like I don't think this is a good ad and I think that's why it's performing well. And I'm like, I'm trying to throw out all of those like conventional practices of like, oh, there's no hook. There's that. Yeah. So I'm like, I'm like, I'm like trying to be so humble about maybe that's why we're at where we're at now. Like, 'cause I'll look at stuff. I'm like, I don't, I don't know if that's like, there's no hook, but I'm like, and then we launch something and it's like, great. You know, it crushes. So that's like our influencer, not to digress too much. That's like our influencer pipeline. The thing that works so well about that is You know, that program stand, like the influencer program stands itself up pretty well. We like at least break even on that and we don't pay extra for most of that content. Uh, Superbloom is just really good at doing the deals. And so like, it's, it's a really great flywheel. I think, I think a flywheel is something where it's like it compounds, you know, and like one thing feeds the other. So it's like, there's really like almost very little cost of that content if we're breaking even. At the very, you know, at, at least on the influencer side. And so that's allowed us to scale it up pretty quickly and, you know, take some bigger swings. Um, and so that's our like influencer pipeline. We have, you know, again, we can go into it. What we'll do is we have some people we work with internally as well. Like somebody crushes, we'll put them on a roster, you know, and be like, hey, we'd love to work with you for 3 months, 6 months, give them upcoming launches. Um, so, you know, that is, that is kind of our main influencer one. Then we have, you know, creators. And I think this is where we could get better. Um, we've never really had like pure UGC perform well. And you know, that's like the whole, like, hey, I'm going to find a creator on Backstage and brief them. I think I have many hypotheses. It never really worked for us. What I've seen more and more of people talking about lately, like it actually doesn't work as well as it used to. That whole like scripted, let me give you a brief again. People are just more numb to ads. So that's where that whole yapper thing is. So we are, we are experimenting a lot and we are, um, trying a bunch of new things and like. Determined to crack it, but I think the more organic it feels like we're going for the whole yapper stuff. We're always testing the brief. So we're using a few different like tools to find these creators.
I don't know.
Do you guys do any, like, how do you guys find your like micro creators that are not influencers if, if you're just looking for content?
Yeah. Well, first off, to like comment on your point of how you're briefing creators, like same, we do not give people scripts ever. Like we, we just don't, we give them bullet points. We say, hey, we want you to talk about these things. We give them visuals. We want them to, um, to show, but like, we do not do that either. And if you go look at our ad account and you're like to organize it or in Motion or in Meta by the creator-led ads, and like you look at the ones that are scaling, like it is stuff that feels more yappery, like it feels authentic. It's, we clearly didn't give them a word-by-word script. So that's how we approach that. Um, in the past when we've been thinking about like non-influencer creators, it's been a super manual process. Like we have a really awesome influencer team and like they handle all things comms or, or creator, right? Just anybody where it's like, hey, we want to go and activate this ad type and here's the type of creators. Like they're going out and they're sourcing those creators and then they'll pass them back to our paid team and they'll say, hey, we like person A, D, and E, but not these other 7 people. Let's go try to sign a deal with them, which works, but it's just a little slow and it's very intensive on the influencer team. So actually what, what we did this year, which is working really as well is, you know, there's a lot of discourse about hiring creators in-house, which I think is a great idea. However, I think when you do that, you kind of limit yourself to that creator style or that handful of creator styles. So we've actually done a slightly different approach where we're actually working with this woman now who was a freelancer of the— she, she's not a full-time employee, but like we have her on a certain number of hours per week and we might ramp it up or down depending on the time of the year and like our marketing calendar. But this, this woman has like this huge roster of creators. So she's basically become this like broker between us as a brand and this like huge roster of creators. So what's cool now is we go to her and we say, hey, Danica, like here's the ad we're trying to make. Here's the moment we have, the persona we want to hit, the new product we have. And then she's going into her roster of creators and saying, I think these are the right people to bring this message into your ad account. And that's been amazing because that allows us to activate with more micro creators. Um, it allows us to move faster because now our influencer team doesn't have to go and like start from scratch every time when it comes to sourcing. And like, this is like all this woman does is like create relationships with creators. So like when we go to her, she knows who we want to activate with. And then it's the same thing as you just said, like once we find someone who works, like we'll, we'll reactivate with them again and again and again and again. So like. And now in our ad account, there's like, you know, 5 to 10 smaller creators that we are activating with over and over again because they performed well. And like, that's that flywheel for us. Like we bring them in through this freelancer we're working with, we test their ads, and then if it works, like you said, we'll go and say, hey, we have, we'll just activate them again, both on evergreen stuff, new product stuff. Like, hey, if you made a cookware ad that works, we're probably going to activate you for Knives. If you made an evergreen ad that works, we probably want to activate you for our summer sale, like whatever it is. And that's, that's like the, the creator flywheel.
Um, and that, I think that's like replacing a lot of agencies. Like I, that's kind of what, you know, we used to use agencies for. We have used agencies who really did a similar thing and now we're, we're kind of building it very similar thing internally. Um, combination, we're using like a software that has like a services component that we're testing. Like we're not sure on, but just to kind of make a lot, like the finding people easier. Um, so I think however you do it, whether it's an agency, whether it's internal, yeah, you need some type of like a network of creators. Are these like, what, what kind of creators are, are they? 'Cause like what I've seen is like what works well for this stuff is like organic creators who have some type of a following in. They're not influencers, they're more, maybe more of like a TikToker, but like they're not like the backstage actor who, you know, is being paid to read a script. Like there's some type of a actual creator. They're just not a huge creator, but they're. They're not charging, like for us, we're paying hundreds of dollars per video, not thousands per video.
Yep. Same here. Yeah. They're not, they're not actors. Like most of them do have some, some social presence, but it's not, it's usually like $10K to $50K. And it seems like what they're doing mainly is making ads and that's where their deal flow and income comes in. And like, I think to like hit on your point, like that is like the alpha is in, um, the ability to like source and brief and produce content quickly. So like that's. That's where you need, and like, that's where I think we've got alpha this year is by activating with this freelancer I mentioned. And now we're moving so much quicker. Yeah.
How quickly can you go from idea to ad launched?
Like weeks now, where that might have taken, you know, a month or two depending on what we were trying to do with them prior when we're the ones going out.
I wanted to get to days. My goal is to get to days. I don't know if you've seen people do that, but like that to me is the goal. And that's what, again, I'm just, we're slow to build out the team in terms of what I need. We're, we're likely gonna hire a freelancer as like a big project to build this out internally and have hopefully creators internally starting freelance, going to a full-time job where it's like, hey, I, my growth team has this idea. When we reviewed content on Monday, I launched that on Wednesday. I launched that on Friday. Something like that is the goal. And by the end of the year, we will, we will get there. I know that there are teams that are there. Um, so obviously weeks are so much better than it used to be, but I feel like the, for the speed of social, that's what's, that's what's needed.
I think especially once you get like different, like as you start to get that process going and you have different creators in different stages, like you can get to a point where you have like new ad, new creator-led ads coming in every single week. And now you're just like, you have, you know, 15 different creators all the way from like just getting briefed to producing content. And then like that flywheel really starts to show up, but Like, I think, I think what's really important for brands is you need to think about like, what, what are we most qualified to do that an agency will never do better than we can? Which is like selecting the creators, selecting the narrative, briefing in these creators. Like no one's gonna know your brand, um, at an agency better than you do in-house. So like, that's the part that like we've really internalized. And then what's the part that is gonna like be a, a drag on the agency or on the in-house team? Well, it's like, the constant comms and sourcing of, of like creators where like our influencer team, yes, that's part of their job, but they're also managing our brand ambassadors. They're also managing all of our organic social comms. Like they have a lot on their plate. They're managing like new initiatives within influencer. Like, hey, we wanna go and activate and be more present on YouTube or whatever. Like how do we do that? So we, that's how we've thought about like why outsource that but not the other stuff. Well, it's like we just think. A freelancer that only thinks about creator relationships and has this like huge roster of relationships that we don't have relationships with those people. Like that's, that's the, the thing that we should outsource and is going to allow us to like kind of create a 1 1 5 situation.
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So that's like the newest flywheel that we're like dipping our toes in. We actually just went and bought, uh, rights, unlimited rights from like 5 or 10 creators that we're now like putting into post-production. That, that process has been a little bit slow because it's the first time we've done it here and like We reached out to some of these folks and they're like, $5,000. Like, I'm not paying you $5,000 for— exactly. But like, then we, so it was just a volume game. Then we found the people that were like, yeah, we'll, we'll sell this content to you for $500 and you can use it in perpetuity forever. And like, they're happy with that because it's just going to get more awareness of them as a creator and affiliate. And like, they're already seeing good affiliate results with TikTok Shop with us. Like, all right, great. This is just going to like enhance that. So. That's the flywheel we're working on right now. We have like, I think, 5 to 10 pieces of content in the hopper that we're going to test with. And then depending on how well those perform, we're going to like try to make that a more robust, always-on flywheel. But for now, it's just been our like affiliate lead going in, looking at content, seeing which ones are selling the best, sending that over to our paid creative team and saying, hey, here's the stuff that's working the best. Here's the stuff that I think is the most like DR product focus. What do you want? And then we're going and negotiating with those people. So it's been a little clunky upfront just because it's a new flywheel for us, but that's one that I'm, I'm very excited on and I'm hoping that can fill like, I just think like the yapper style content, like TikTok shop affiliates are the most good at that because they need to sell product to, to like eat and make money. So I'm excited to see how those perform in our Meta account.
Let's say we're one step ahead of you, so I'm not going to pretend I have it figured out. But I'll, I'll give you, you know, what I've learned so far, because we're starting to get some winners. So it's very much a volume play we're using. Um, Yuka, they're, I guess they have like a beta where they're trying to request rights. So you can request a flat dollar amount or percentage. We haven't had anyone take— yeah, Yuka, it's like a TikTok shop software. We haven't had anybody accept the percentage yet, but I really hope that people will, because then it's like, all right, I'm just going to request on every single piece. Like there's just no harm on like every single piece. It's very much a volume play. These are, yeah, E-U-K-A. Um, these are, you know, hundreds of dollars per video. Like this is probably your cheapest per video piece of content, um, that you request. We are figuring out the right amount to request because to get like the acceptance rate, you know, whatever. So not a lot of people are accepting right now, but we're trying to just go a volume play. And because we've gotten some winners. You know, and it's very, it's, it's very cheap. It's like just a volume play. You have, again, trying to be humble. We, I have no idea what's going to perform on this stuff. Like, I don't think it's easy to go through and be like, oh, it's that one. So it's like, let's just request a lot. Let's get a lot of people accepting. Let's get a lot launched. It's very low cost. And, and, you know, get a few winners. What we've seen again, yeah, for that note, it's, it's so organic. These TikTokers are really good at, you know, yapping. It's, it's shot in a way where it's just so not an ad. So it gets a lot of Reels delivery that it has improved new reach for us. Um, and again, like not a lot of cuts, their head is cut off. It's like, it's so imperfect. And this is just what I believe consumers want now. And so, um, so yeah, highly recommend it, especially once you get success, then it's just like, it's just blocking, tackling and scaling it up. So we're in the process of trying to do that and figure out how we get more accepted and how we just get as many bids in as possible. Um, but I believe that's a, that's one of the best flywheels you can have. Obviously Comfort talks about it a lot. I know, uh, Cuts, it's been really successful for Cuts as well.
Um, I'm going to send you to our team and yeah, it's a beta, but I can, let me reach out to them.
Um, I just think also like even on the whole like Super Bloom stuff, the influencer stuff we're doing, like when you tell somebody to make an ad, even if you're saying, hey, we want organic inspo, like, yep. I just feel like when they know it's an ad, it's different versus like if it's an organic piece, it's just like it comes off different. And so I just, I actually really love that. Like switching us to organic social again, I don't know if you guys are doing anything. We are finding a ton of success with organic social, especially if it's like a creator-led organic social. Like, you know, we just launched this Emily DiGenato thing and like 2 days before launch, I like sent it to my team and I, and like, I wouldn't say they're performing amazing, but they're performing like above average compared to everything else. I was like, here's all the organic stuff that I saw our team working on and that she sent over, like just launch it all. You know? And I really think everybody should have a campaign and a flywheel for organic social reels. Because that's where, if you pay attention to Meta's earnings reports and all that, like that's where all the growth is of users and engagement. They're now trying to get people actually back on Facebook and they're, they're, hopefully it's a little game for some people. They're trying to grow Facebook and they're incentivizing creators to post on Facebook and, you know, reels and stuff. but right now it's all been reels. And so if you want new reach and to reach new users and where people are, you have to get reels delivery. And what better way to do that than by getting organic reels? So highly bullish on that. Um, and it's been obviously something that we're working on, like scaling up like creator organic social programs. So we're starting to test, you know, some of that now that's like stuff that is made for organic social and ads, but even our like creator or like brand organic social that does well. I've been shocked how well it's actually worked.
So that's the flywheel. We haven't, like, it's on my list, um, to try, but we just, we're trying the TikTok Shop affiliate stuff first because it's, it's more in line with like what, what has worked with us.
Totally.
I do want, I need that. We do need to try, like, even if they require slight recuts, because most of our, like, a lot of our creator-led reels, if you go look, are, they're really engaging, but they're just like they're not ads, right? They're very much like, hey, here's this recipe I'm making, um, stuff like that. So, uh, but I am, I am excited about that just to see what, yeah, see what comes of it. Um, I'm curious, I wanna ask you, I want, I wanna like move up, up the, the ladder here and talk about like creator-led stuff that's a little bit more, um, higher ticket. 'Cause I'm curi— I wanna ask how you are structuring that 'cause we've totally, totally changed up how we're structuring those deals where historically we might have signed like a 12-year or a 12-month deal that has, you know, organic deliverables, paid deliverables, all the whitelisting stuff, event appearances. You have to come into our studio, um, X days per week. And now we've, we've really shifted and pivoted towards saying, hey, let's just do the bare minimum that we know is gonna drive performance here over a much shorter period of time. And, and like, test that out with like a 3 to 6 months usage. And then if it works, like go into, go into a bigger deal. So like for us, for example, we work with Outer Signal and like one of the cool things about Outer Signal is, um, like the, the persona stuff that it gives you. So based on some of the personas that they, that they gave us, which is like, dude, their persona stuff is so good.
We use it for everything. It's so good.
Yeah, it's amazing. It's super detailed. It, and so like one of the ones that we found was what is called like the executive Epicurean, which is this kind of like high achieving person that is like an executive, high earner. You know, they're an entrepreneur or a doctor or whatever, like kind of, you know, you think of when you think about like a, like a high alpha person in a high achieving role and they're trying to optimize our—
one of our— sorry to cut you off, but one of our personas is the high performance exec is one of ours.
Really? Okay. So, so based on that, like I've also— I've always thought we should go and like activate some ads with the, like the tech entrepreneur who's like, I like, I perform high in every aspect of my life and cookies, no different, cooking's no different. So what we're doing is we're actually doing an ad deal with Sahil Bloom. And that deal is like, we, I think he hits that persona perfectly and like he already owns Hexclad. I see it show up a little bit organically in his YouTube content. He is a content creator, right?
So did he buy, you saw him in Outer Signal?
Uh, no, we actually seeded him a long time ago, but I think, I I think he had already had some products and I was, he's like, oh, I love it. I'm like, oh, let us send you more. And like, and he's like, oh, this, these are great. So like organically loves our content. Check number 1, or our products. Check number 1. Check number 2, he's a creator, so we're not bringing him into the studio. Like he's gonna make it super native, super authentic. He's a YouTuber, which is a channel we're trying to show up on more. So he'll create it for YouTube and then we'll do cutdowns for paid social and like, that's a deal where, um, we're not signing like a 12-month deal with him. We're signing a, a 3-month deal with him. That's part flat fee, part percent of spend with a cap. And then we will decide if we want to like expand that deal moving forward. So like, that's, that's been the approach with how, like, that's been a big shift in how we sign these like larger influencer deals. And it just, I think that's the way to do it. Cause it's like the perfect balance. Like you're giving the creator some upside here. Um, but you're also hedging in case it doesn't work that well and you don't, You know, for, for us, like we want to spend, you know, at least not, we probably don't need to spend half a million on it, but we probably want to spend like $250,000, $300,000 on his ads to feel like we're getting a really nice ROI, which I think is possible over the course of 3 months. Um, and then we can go and expand it if, if it does work. So like, that's, that's like the other, like moving upstream to like the higher ticket influencer creator flywheel. Like that's been a, a big shift in how we do those things and those, deals get signed so much quicker when you don't have event deliverables and shoot day deliverables and organic post deliverables. Like those deals just get dragged on and on and on because those influencer managers, but like a lot of times they're like nitpicking over all these different things. It's like, no, no, no. Like let's just boil it down to what actually drives an ROI, which for us is paid ads with creators and influencers. And then we can add in those things later on if we want to. And that's been like a really amazing. Shift for us as a brand. And we've been able to sign these like larger creator deals quicker because of just the boiled down deliverables. The furthest end is the creators that we are doing, um, like huge, bigger activations on. And for those, we have just like full on, like we have a biweekly production meeting between our content team who does really function as like an internal, you know, agency, um, for the whole org where like when we're doing these larger activations, like we did a, we did this deal with this, um, Canadian NHL player and like we shot like a really hi-fi YouTube ad, um, that we'll do cutdowns in Meta for. Uh, we're doing a bunch of organic social stuff. I think he had an event. So for those, we were just having like, you know, pretty fully fleshed out kickoff calls where just to make sure that every single team that has a deliverable related to them knows that they have a deliverable related to them and we can create a plan to make sure we're getting the most out of that on that shoot day. 'Cause that's when we're like, going to, you know, Canada in this case and doing a full-on shoot. And I've just seen it too many times where it's like, hey, we're 3 weeks out, 2 weeks out from the shoot. And like, so-and-so didn't know that we were doing that. And now we're like rushing to get a paid brief in. And, um, you just have to build those, like, you just have to build out a process to make sure that you're maximizing those shoot days.
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They have a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the Houzz Growth Lab. One is in LA on May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area. If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about CMM, go to Houzz.io/operators. To start making better data-driven decisions today. So we should do like an updated process meeting. Cause like that's the hardest part. And I'm like jumping back in a little bit more of like, how do you know, how do you get all, all of this stuff done? Especially like launches and whatever. Like it would be cool to do an updated one, but, um, but yeah, so, so similar. I mean, that's really exciting to hear. Yeah, we, we, we never really did like the big stuff. Like the only time we do events is like, you know, we just did the, this thing with Emily. Like that was like in the deal and in the contract, like Normally it's really just more of a standard, like influencer thing. Again, Superbloom handles most of our, especially the bigger ones. For those deals, we are primarily looking for paid usage. If we, like, when we underrate the deals, we look at it that way. We don't expect to be profitable or break even on the influencer side. It's just not possible with the rates that you get and whatever the value is at. So the way that we look at it, we have a certain content efficiency, you know, we look for. Um, you know, we talk about it, but we, we attempt to spend 10 times the amount that we spend on, on the content on the media. So if we spend $10K, we need to spend $100K behind it. It's at least the goal. What we do is most of this content is an Instagram story first, and it's just, it's how the deals work. It's usually like the most cost-effective way to do it. And so what we'll do is whatever those drive organically, we'll subtract that from the cost the content. So, you know, we had one large creator, she's 30K, her, her, you know, we had to do a 3-month deal with her. Like we, we would not do a 3-month deal unless we had to. The thing that gave us confidence, it was like the biggest deal for us at the time, is she was just a known creator who crushed, you know, like have talked to other brands who she's, you know, worked really, really well for. I've seen, you know, a lot was just really good fit. So she was first bet and like crushed. Like she sold out of actually one of our holiday kits, like perfect timing that we wouldn't have sold out of. But, um, it was, you know, again, a 3-month deal. That was like the, that was like a bet and the biggest investment, you know, but so her first Instagram story essentially broke even, drove, drove, you know, broke even, which we were not expecting. So then like her paid media was just like icing on the cake kind of, and we were able to spend a few hundred thousand on it, but it was great. Her next one, I don't want to say flop, but let's call it like, you know, made a third of the revenue back. So we just subtract that number from the content cost. And so if it was, I'm just making up numbers, was $10K for content, she drove $2K. Well, now it's at $8K. So now we need to spend $80K on it in 30 days. That's primarily how we look at it. And then every creator influencer handles, you know, renewals differently, but we usually go 30 days rights. And, and my growth team, when we come up on the end of it, we'll just forecast. And now we have this like cool Claude tool that'll do it, but we just forecast what we think the next 30 days content efficiency is. And as long as we're hitting our media KPIs and we forecast that we'll, we'll keep it in that range, then we'll like go to our influencer team to do a renewal. Um, but that's primarily it. And, you know, we've done, I would say, two like larger deals. The, the second one that we did, uh, you and I have talked about has just wrapped up. Same creator you guys have, have, have worked with and you guys did a pretty large deal with. I would say good performance, not excellent. We probably like a 17% content efficiency. That's just looking at meta, like so much of this is the contracts that you're able to get. And we had it on TikTok, we had it on YouTube. Like, if the more— I think the biggest thing with this entire episode that we're not talking about enough is like the leverage and the efficiency. Is like, how can you get the most out of your creative? Like, yes, it has to perform, but like, how can you use it across different channels and have like one work stream, you know, really, really funneling other stuff? But if we just look at Meta, you know, 17%, not exactly what we wanted, drove super high net new, not amazing, like Dorothy. I actually think that's a good thing, but that was like a 30-day and we're like, hey, it was a bet. We don't feel like we lost money. Like it was a good thing. We're not going to rush to rebook her right away, but let's do it. But we were like, hey, we're 2 for 2 on bigger ones. Let's go take a bigger swing. And so now we're, you know, every, we have a new Hero launch coming out. Like we're, you know, trying to take a big swing and continuing to kind of move up, but it's, it's, it's primarily that it's, it's usually some type of an Instagram story, 1 or 2. Occasionally a reel, but yeah, like, and I've talked to, you know, other brands about it. It's like, it's very, very hard with these large creators to, you know, be profitable on just, uh, just one time. So I think you, if you're approaching it for ads, you have to do what we're doing. If you're approaching it on like a more organic side, you have to structure the deal in a way where you're able to leverage a lot out of it. Um, much more so. And I think you guys do a lot of that where you'll get a lot of deliverables from this one creator.
Yeah. Well, let me, let me ask you a question on the 17%. So are you saying if, if let's just say to make the numbers easy, it was a $100,000 deal. Are you saying you spent $117K on that, on paid behind the content?
Dude, you're going to put me on the spot for public math.
Sorry. Sorry.
So, so if it was a $10K deal, right, 10x content efficiency would be $100K. Yeah, that would have been the target. We spent less than that. So we spent probably $70K on it behind. I see. I see. Okay. It was not bad, but it just wasn't quite at our numbers. Um, but 17% is not bad. You know, it was, it was definitely not bad.
I mean, that's, that's, it still seems like you got a huge ROI on it if, yeah.
I mean, it's an ambitious target. I don't know that everyone targets that.
It is very, well, honestly, like when you told me that, you got me thinking about how like we need to measure and what we need to be pushing towards. So like, that's been something that I've been talking to the team about in the last month is just like, A, reporting on it more regularly, but B, pushing harder when we can to make sure we're getting as big of a, a big of a multiple. Supplier on what we paid them. You know what, what I think is interesting to think about as well, like, and we've been talking about creator ads and influencer ads that are creators, which is like that, there's a reason that is such a big part of most brands flywheels because A, there's a lot of social proof baked into those types of ads when you have this well-known creator, like endorsing your product and your brand. But B, they're creators. So like they can make content for you and it's not a big lift on, you know, all you have to do is brief them. Source them, source them, brief them, and then the ball's in their court, which, you know, depending on who the creator is, that can be a good or a bad thing. You know, we've definitely had creators where they've just like signed the deal and they've taken forever to deliver and it's like, you know, now we're sitting here 3, 6 months later, it's like, what's going on? And they're not that organized, obviously. I think where we've created some alpha is actually being able to create really compelling ads with people that have a lot of respect and authority in the space, but they're not creators. So because we have such a built-out production team and system and resource now, like we can bring these creators into our studio, make really, really great ads with them because while they're not creators, often they're still very good in front of a camera. And I think there's so much alpha in that for brands. So I think your ability then to go and say, hey, this person's not a creator, but like, they are an influencer in our space. And if we can make a really good ad with them, I think it can perform well. And I think that's been one of the areas that we've been able to really excel at in the last year or two years is just like creating really good ads with these non-creator influencers. And we've put tons of money behind them and like, I just don't see our competitors doing as much of that. I see it here and there, but I think that's one of our strong suits and like, That's what happened with this like hockey player that we activated with. Like he's a hockey player, he's not a creator. Like if we go and brief him and say, hey, make this ad on your iPhone at home, like he's not gonna know what to do. But like we went out to Canada, shot with him, produced a really beautiful, well-done ad, and I have a lot of confidence that it's gonna scale both US and, and in Canada. And like we have a bunch of chefs that also fall into that bucket where, you know, they're not creators, but they are, um, really like highly respected chefs and like we've been able to bring them into our studio, shoot with them and just get a ton of scale. And I think that's such an important flywheel, like the ability to, to do production at scale. Like I think that can take a brand from $50 million to $100 or $100 to $300 because the ability to just shoot ads that your competitors can't, that really separates you. And I think those ads have a ton of upside on scaling versus like the creator-led stuff.
You know who did that well? You guys do an incredible job of that. Turtle Box, remember we had them on the pod and they had that like ambassador program. Like I, like, I think that's really cool. I think blending like creators or celebs or athletes with like, you know, more of a produced style, I think is really cool. In an ideal world, like I think what we're trying to do is like, we've had a few people we actually wanted to do larger partnerships with and, you know, numbers came back and it's like, hey, let's, let's, let's start first paid social. Let's see how it does. And it just didn't land and perform. And I was like, I, I'm so like, we just can't kind of justify that. Like, so like again, even our big Emily deal, like we started with just a paid social deal, you know, and it performed well. Like there was clearly something there. Like I do think if there is a way, and it doesn't always work if those people aren't a creator, but I do think that helps to de-risk it a little bit. You know, it's still an investment, but it's not, you don't have to go with a giant multi-six-figure investment. Right out the gate. Otherwise it's, it's a bet and it's a test.
Yeah, I agree. I think that's the consistent theme I'm taking from this episode that we're both doing is like start small and layer on top and grow it. Don't do it the other way because you're going to end up burning a lot of money if you do it the other way.
But I really want to do that. I really want to do that. I'm trying to get better at that, which maybe will bring us to last point is, is like more of like a produced flywheel, you know, how you, how you leverage those stuff. Like I feel like everything we've been talking about is has been what I'd say is bottoms up where it's like bunch of different videos, stuff like that, volume approach, feel the ad account and you're kind of creating, you know, you're creating kind of more bottom funnel, lower cost things and putting them at account. But one of the things that we, we just did a giant shoot on and talking about production stuff, I know you guys do a really great job with, with, you know, produce things is, is kind of a top-down approach of these hero assets, these TV commercials, YouTube things. And are you leveraging that across paid social, different channels, or are those like completely separate?
No, we are. So like I said, every quarter we have this production roadmap that our creative strategy lead creates and she more or less like pitches me and I say, yep, yep, yep. Nope, don't like that. Don't think we should do that. You missed these things that I think we should do. And then that turns into cool, now we have a finalized plan and then it turns into which of these concepts are, are most like, which of these concepts are gonna come to life with us producing, like the best with us producing them, whether that's us like just producing them without talent or us bringing talent into the studio. And then that creates this like paid media production roadmap where it's like, all right, here's all the productions that we're gonna do specifically for paid in this quarter. And then we are just planning those throughout the quarter and it could be And then some of it is just baked into like our always-on stuff. Like every time we launch a new product now, like we do a product hype reel and like product hype reels have become a really high-performing content pillar for us. So not all of it is like one-off net new stuff, but that's like for us, that top-down approach where it starts with a plan. We map out what stuff needs to get produced, we slot in the production days, and then we have these biweekly production meetings between our, our content production team and our creative strategy team. So we can just make sure that we're continuing to, to move the needle on these cuz A lot of these concepts are not a, a handful of these concepts, I should say, like take a long time. Like we have a few, a few concepts that are in the final, I'd say like on the 5-yard line that we've literally been working on for like 4 months. 'Cause they're like really high production, new concepts that we really wanted to nail. And we think they're gonna be, become like pillars of our YouTube account and ultimately our paid social account. So we're shooting a lot of it like landscape, hi-fi. Um, and then we're doing like, making sure that it has like, we'll literally have the camera that's like, all right, this is shot for YouTube, but then we have like the 4x5 zones and the 9x16 zones on the camera. So we know when we're shooting it that it can get cut down for Meta because that's everything we do now when we shoot it in studio is like, we, we need to this, we need to get as much juice out of this as possible. So we need to shoot it for Meta. We need to make sure it works for vertical and all the, like, Apple, Meta, TikTok, we need to make sure like the 4:5s for Meta feed are there. So like we are very thoughtful about, we're not getting into post-production being like, ah, this isn't gonna scale to vertical. It's like, no, no, we're, we're making sure it scales to, to vertical video. Um, and that's been, oh my God, so many. Like, I mean, in an 8-hour shoot day, like we can, we're at a point now where our, you know, our content team is so good. Our head of content's amazing and his team's amazing. Like we can shoot a CTV ad, we can shoot, you know, 6 different core paid social concepts and then have like a bunch of different hooks on them to iterate. And then also have like the landscape format, the vertical format, and the 4:5 format. So that, you know, ends up often turning into like 30, 40 ads when you get to the end of post-production. And it's just like crazy what you can do with, uh, with an 8-hour shoot day. When you have a good plan going into it.
Definitely, dude. So we just did, we have like a, this product that has 30 shades. And so we, we did like our normal, just like video photo shoot. And then we were like, oh, we're gonna need to do something bigger. So we did an open casting. We like, you know, did this campaign where we invited people. So we brought in, you know, probably 30 people for every shade and like some creators. And we actually did scope some creators and, you know, contracted some creators. Um, to get even like, you know, behind the scenes content of it, get user rights, but mostly just like customers, people wanted to come. And so we brought in, uh, like we had our normal photo shoot, our team doing it. And then we had, I brought in a production, you know, agency. I think, I think I sent it to you. Um, and, and they got 30 hours of footage in a one-day shoot. So they had like 3, 4 cameras rolling, you know, granted we spent an arm and a leg, but I think the thing is I was like, if we're gonna do this, it just, you know, A, we need the content, but B, like, we just have to really maximize what we can get out of it. So we'll have social teaser, hero video, probably 8 different social, like organic social follow-up, you know, assets of it. Plus obviously all the B-roll. Uh, we've got 8 YouTube ads, all like, not even like hooks and stuff, like unique YouTube ads. Um, all of that will be cut for, you know, Meta. Uh, paid social will have Meta, you know, brand forward, 5, 6 second for reach campaigns. We'll have, you know, more, it's still like polished stuff, but, but more performance-oriented meta stuff. So yeah, same thing. We'll probably get, you know, like just for the launch, we'll probably get 50 assets out of this. And then not to just mention all of the iterations and variations we're going to do, you know, so we'll have it in, you know, we have TVs in our retail store, like we'll have it in there. Like it's, it's pretty incredible what the right team can do with, you know, experience, but also like the right plan going into it.
When we've been able to go from saying, hey, you owe us a shoot day per quarter to, hey, we only want like 2 shoot days per year. And that really brings down the cost of the deal. But it's just because we know the playbook now when we go into these shoot days, like we're shooting sometimes like super hi-fi, like TV stuff. We're always shooting paid social. We're always shooting organic social. And then we're— there's always— and then we have all the formats and then we have all the different scripts that we want them to hit on and all the scripts have, have like hook variations. Like we just have that playbook down, whereas we didn't have that playbook down. So we did, like, we would get to the end of the shoot day sometimes like, oh, well, we have one, another one, 2 months. It's no worries. But now we have the playbook down. Now the deals don't cost as much. Now we're getting more out of less shoot days. And like, it's just optimized over time. And it's just, I've been blown away by how much spend we can get behind all those different assets on all those different channels. Like, it's just, We're getting huge ROIs on some of these, some of these deals that like candidly, like costs sometimes $200,000, $300,000 per year. I mean, these are like big chefs with like big followings and huge clout in their space, but like when you can go and spend a million or more on that, on just on the paid stuff, like it's like, that's easy. Like that's not even including all the events they're doing and the organic social stuff they're doing and having Hexclad in their restaurants. Like it, it's just, it's so easy for us to go and rationalize these deals and now we have a playbook for it that. you know, I feel confident, like I can, when I like see someone, it's like, hey, this person came across so-and-so's desk. Like it takes me like 5 to 10 minutes to be like, yeah, I think we can replicate the playbook with this person. And it just gives me a lot of confidence now in spending some of these larger chunks of money up front, um, because we have that playbook dialed.
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You guys are masters at it. We're trying to— we're trying to catch up, but, but definitely good. Do you, do you guys call it like an ambassador program? Do you guys have like a page on your site where you're like, this is our ambassadors or not?
We call it our culinary council. So if you go to our website, we have this page that's like our HexCloud partners page and one of the drops. So it's like the New York Yankees. Still Gin, and then the Culinary Council's the one in the middle here. And it, and it outlines, like, yeah, there's basically, I think we have 5 chefs that are on the Culinary Council. It's Claire Smith, Nancy, Dominique Gordon, and Paul Ainsworth. And again, not, I would say the only, even Gordon, like he's not a true, he's not a creator in the sense of like a social, a social media chef. Like anytime Gordon's creating content, right? It's on a pretty big production. Like when he's creating content on its own, it's very much like this, this style, like Gordon Reacts. But none of these people are true creators, which I think again gives us some alpha because we're, we can bring them in and shoot content with them. And, um, and it's just like pretty crazy what our content team can do in an 8-hour shoot day.
We're literally wrapping up our two big partnerships for this year. And I'm like telling my team, like, tell me when you're ready to talk next year. Cause like, this is kind of what I want to do. It's like called an ambassador program. I think actually like one of the more important things for, for, you know, running D2C and like, So much of this is about, yes, you need the right strategy and it's got to perform, but a big part of performance is like, you know, the, the workflow and like getting the most value out of it. And yeah, like not just doing a $300 grand for one shoot, but like how do you get as much leverage behind that as possible?
Yeah. And one other thing I'll add on that, what we have found is like what performs well on organic social is often very different than like a paid ad. But when you're So we've started actually like briefing creators separately where like, let's say we're going to activate with a few creators for a new product drop and we want to do organic, like, um, you know, collaborative posts with them. And we also want to run ads with that, make ads and run them from their pages on our pages. We'll go and actually send them two different briefs, but generally, like, if you're paying $5,000 for a deal and you say, hey, we want you to do two different concepts, it doesn't necessarily like scale just because you're saying, hey, here's a paid and an organic post because they're shooting at the same time in the same setup. Like it's not just 'cause you're doing two different concepts doesn't mean they're necessarily gonna double their rate. Like yes, the rate will go up, but there's a way to negotiate and be like, hey, we're actually not asking you to do like 80% of what you're doing is gonna be the same. It's just like a, a different script and a few different visuals. So I think you can often get multiple briefs in with a creator and not necessarily have the, the rate of that creator scale with like, as the concepts are scaling. And that's been a, something that we've done more recently in the last like 6 months where it's like most of the time now we are briefing them in separately for organic and separately for paid. And we're just getting more bang for our buck by doing that.
Dude, totally. Because they, they want the number, right? They're not really, because they're a solo operator, they're not thinking in terms of gross margin and like price for a video. Like they're just going to anchor it to the number. And so, yeah, what we do is, you know, we'll obviously like offer a little bit less, whatever. Well, you know, let's, I'm just making it up. Let's say like they want $10K. I'm like, oh, $5K, $4K was our budget. Uh, but we could do $6K if you could also throw this in. And so your cost per video, like, yes, your total cost is more, but your cost per video is actually significantly better. And it's a win-win. The creator perceives that a win as win as well, because it's not that much extra for them to make another video. You know, they're not thinking about the cost of that. They're just thinking about, hey, what did I get? You know, what did I charge this brand? And have seen that work incredibly well.
Yeah, they just made 2 more grand, but your cost per video went from 4 or 5 to 3. Yeah, 100%.
If you think about it from their side, like they're not thinking like they're not paying somebody, they're not thinking, okay, here's my gross margin, here's my cost on this. They're just like, oh yeah, I'll do another video while I'm already doing it.
You know, it's really nothing to me, but I mean, what is it, an extra 30 minutes, 60 minutes for them? Yeah, 100%.